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General Photography

“A photograph of a naked anorexic woman appeared on Monday in Italian newspapers and on billboards to highlight the effects of the illness during Milan fashion week while promoting a fashion brand.” (story) You can see the images (plus some commentary) here on Andrew’s blog. The problem I have with this is that I just cannot believe that fashion company really cares about anorexia (of course, they claim they do).Read more »

“Up to 70 percent of first responders are ill as a result of 9/11 contamination. If a similar rate of illness holds true for those who lived and worked near the Twin Towers, the number of seriously ill New Yorkers could climb to 300,000 in the near future.” (story) Also don’t miss this photo series about the same topic.Read more »

Anthony Lane is one of the finest writers New Yorker magazine employs - he typically writes movie reviews (which, unlike most of the movies he discusses, are not to be missed) - and it’s a particular treat to read his article about Leica cameras.Read more »

“I’m looking for a democratic perfect image of myself. So it is up to you to give me directions how I should change my face and body.” - Go and tell Monique Bergen Henegouwen what to fix next on her blog.Read more »

In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic write the New York Times about these photo albums of Auschwitz SS guards. It’s probably quite a bit less surprising to see these photos - not that it does take away from their initial shock value - if one keeps in mind what Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil.Read more »

“Gifted, beautiful and unpredictable, Lee Miller’s career took her from the fashion pages of Vogue to the front line of the second world war. But while she is celebrated as one of the finest photographers of the 20th century, her great talents as a writer are often forgotten” (story)Read more »

“The world’s largest photograph will have its premier showing in the Wind Tunnel at Art Center’s South Campus. This landmark photograph, a gelatin silver image that is three stories high by 11 stories wide, was produced in the summer of 2006 using a shuttered Southern California F-18 jet hangar transformed into an enormous camera obscura — the largest camera ever made.” (source) There’s a website about the photo here and a movie about the “making of” here. As much as I find such attempts to create an even larger photo than ever before not all that interesting, I am quite glad to see that it’s not yet another digital photo.Read more »

Maybe someone can explain this to me. On the one hand, there are frequent complaints in the fine-art photo community about the (perceived) poor quality of the photography over at Flickr. On the other hand, ‘vernacular photography’ (the kind of stuff that people would have put up on Flickr - had it existed fifty years ago) is becoming ever more popular. I must be missing something.Read more »

In a recent entry, Michael Shaw discusses the absence of people in the media’s coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “I suppose the absence of even one soul in either cover is supposed to convey profound loss and disappearance. Still, I find this tendency disconcerting. Just like the lead image from Saturday’s front page story in the LA Times (or the previous TIME cover on the catastrophe, for that matter), we hardly see a sign of life. So, are these images effective for the absence of people, or do they reflect a disaster without a human face?” I wouldn’t know what the editors and writers at the various magazines and newspapers were thinking, but there is another possible explanation, which Simon Norfolk talks about in this excellent interview. Once you include people in a photograph, they “become what the photograph is.” (emphasis in the original interview) Thus, photographing the people who still suffer from the ongoing neglect and mismanagement would exclude those people from the picture - figuratively and literally speaking - who are responsible for that mismanagement (and vice versa).Read more »

I can’t think of a better place and a worse place (at the same time!) as the location for a poster copy of Andreas Gursky’s ‘99 Cents’ than a dollar store - found and photographed by Kristopher Stallworth.Read more »

I am not sure I am all that impressed by what we are being offered as portraiture of famous people these days. More often than not, it seems to me, it’s more important to have some sort of gimmick in the photo - often accompanied by gratuitous Photoshopping, to make the result look like a still from a Disney movie. Make no mistake, there is a time and place for this look - for example, in an ad for Disneyland. But this kind of portraiture has become so common that I’m wondering when people will snap out of it. In a sense, it’s not too different from the portraiture that people loved about one hundred years ago, where a b/w photo would be gaudily hand coloured.Read more »

No, it’s not what you think. I went to look through the Perspective Distortion pool to look for… well, there’s the problem. I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for (that’s very helpful, isn’t it?), but I figured if it’s somewhere, it might be in that pool. I did find a few photos that almost made my brain hurt, and since you probably won’t believe me, look at this, for example, or at this. And then I also came across this photo, which is quite interesting, because unlike the two other examples it looks almost normal, but something is not quite right.Read more »

That is the question. For an opinion about Flickr that’s about as flawed (for different reasons, though) as Stephen Shore’s bashing of Flickr (see the quote in Alec’s post) check, for example, this post.Read more »

There is a long article about contemporary photography in Germany’s weekly Die Zeit, which unfortunately you won’t be able to enjoy unless you are able to read German. The article made me realize how different the photography scene in Germany really is. It’s quite instructive to notice how many Germans apparently don’t realize how well some of their photographers are doing internationally. And it’s very refreshing to see how a widely read magazine discusses in such a simple and accepting fashion the use of digital technologies and the changes they brought to photography, without getting mired in either hyping digital technologies or bemoaning violations of photographic orthodoxy. Hopefully, there will be an English translation of the article (I doubt it, though).Read more »

“Responding to an outcry that included a passionate Internet campaign and a satiric rap video, city officials yesterday backed off proposed new rules that could have forced tourists taking snapshots in Times Square and filmmakers capturing that only-in-New-York street scene to obtain permits and $1 million in liability insurance.” (story)Read more »

Photography, when taken as a form of art, derives its strength from the fact that a photo might evoke something unique in us. We have been well trained to respond to the photographic language used in the media - regardless of whether we actually feel what we say we feel, but when we deal with photography taken as an art form, we have more freedom. We feel more comfortable to see what it does to us, we feel more comfortable to let it get closer to us.Read more »

Much has been said by and about Tod Papageorge over at Alec’s blog recently, and there is no need for me to add anything to that discussion. Those interested in the photography discussed in that context will probably enjoy reading an essay by Tod Papageorge entitled Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, posted over at Eric Etheridge’s site.Read more »

I’ve long been fascinated by Dutch classical landscape paintings, with their sweeping, majestic skies, underneath of which you often find the somewhat barren Dutch landscape, sometimes with a city somewhere small, seen from afar. Art historians and theorists are probably much better suited to talk about these paintings than I am, and I admit I have no idea what they might talk about. For me, these paintings resonate with something inside of me for two reasons. First, these Dutch paintings show a landscape very similar to the one I grew up in. And second, they convey a sense of humility: We like to think of us humans as the masters of this planet, but when we are really honest and step back a little, we actually have very little power.Read more »

“We, the undersigned, believe that the new rules currently under consideration for Film Permits (Chapter 9, Title 43 of the City Rules of New York) will have an irrevocable impact on independent filmmakers and photographers and their ability to engage in creative work in New York.” - sign here (you’re in good company! - background here)Read more »

While working on my most recent Personal Favourites post, I spent some time thinking about photographic formats again - a topic that does not get a lot of attention and that typically only comes up in the (unfortunate) form of print sizes. Of course, size is just one aspect, the other one is the aspect ratio. Ignoring diptychs or spherical exposures, rectangular images are most common, with the two extremes (width and height equal [a square] and width much larger than height [a panorama]) being somewhat rare. The latter extreme, the panorama, seems most unusual, and of all the formats it might be the one hardest to work with.Read more »

“Using computer-vision technology to automate the registration process, one can now for the first time view almost the entire collection of the Prokudin-Gorskii photographs in color. […] The resolution is fairly low […] In addition, the warping process introduces some blur, further degrading the sharpness of the images. Finally, there was no attempt to retouch the images to remove the many scanning artifacts, dirt and other damage that was done to the originals” (source) Hopefully, the extra work needed to get the full set in maximum quality will be done some time.Read more »

“If you happen by 3701 N. Fairfax Drive in Arlington and decide you have a sudden craving for a photograph of a generic suburban office building, and you point your camera at said structure, you will rather quickly be greeted by uniformed security folks who will demand that you delete the image and require that you give up various personal information. When Keith McCammon unwittingly took a picture of that building, he was launched on an odyssey that has so far involved an Arlington police officer, the chief of police and the defense of the United States of America.” - storyRead more »

Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cents” is not just one of my personal favourites, it probably is the one, the photo that I would name - when pressed - as my personal favourite photo. For me, “99 Cents” embodies all that makes contemporary photography the exciting art form that it has become.Read more »

Picking up what I linked to yesterday (and then there’s a bit more here - scroll down to the comments), it is interesting to see how once editorial work (done by fine-art photographers) is concerned, there is a new complex of topics. For the photographers there are some new problems to tackle (see Alec’s comment), and it seems to me that everybody else has to deal with expectations. We know what photographer X has been doing for a while, and we simply expect to find something along those lines in his or her editorial work - an expectation that (just like any other expectation) is not very helpful (even though it’s exactly the kind of expectation that certain magazines seem to count on when hiring well-known fine-art photographers for editorial work).Read more »

Liz Kuball commented on recent editorial work by Todd Hido, and Andrew Hetherington (who knows a thing or two about editorial work) responds - a must read for everybody who has ever been disappointed about editorial work by a fine-art photographer!Read more »

This review of some of Florian Maier-Aichen’s work neatly makes the case against, as the reviewer calls it, “modern photographic orthodoxy […] that the world seen directly through a camera’s lens is richer than imagination in creative possibility.”Read more »

Mark Sullo was kind enough to point out this following article (incl. the bits I’m going to talk about). The article, He finds beauty in the basic, is about Taj Forer’s Threefold Sun, and on the second page, you can find the following: “Forer’s work fits every definition of ‘documentary photography.’ His settings are found (not staged), his images are straight (not manipulated digitally) and his photographs feel intensely natural.”Read more »

If I was to ask you to name an American 20th Century portrait photographer, I think Sally Mann’s name would probably not be the first one to come up. It is true, there are lots of well-known American 20th Century portrait photographers, some of which I already talked about on this blog, like for example Richard Avedon. But somehow, Sally Mann doesn’t seem to register in a way Richard Avedon does. I find that very unfortunate.Read more »

Via The Sonic Blog come these two following links, photographic exhibitions of two different countries. The first, How We Are at the Tate Britain, the second, Leidkultur, a portrait of Germany online (use the pull-down menu at the top right to access photo series). I think the two shows are most interesting when compared with each other - two ways of introspection, two different ideas of how much there is to celebrate.Read more »

It seems to me that many questions about photography - like, for example, the one just discussed by Shane - boil down to the complex of authenticity. I find it quite interesting to see how many people still want a photograph to be absolutely authentic. It has to depict something that really happened or that really exists that way. So “street photography” is taken as more authentic (or honest) than, say, staged photography (a variant of this is the “reality TV” craze, which shows “real” people and their “real” problems). I really don’t know how useful such an approach to photography is. If we were to make authenticity our criterion for what is good and bad photography, we would limit our experience of photography as an art form quite severely.Read more »

“John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photographyâ€™s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81.” - NY Times obituaryRead more »

The Exposure Project picks up a topic that I have been worried about for quite a while: “Catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina certainly need to be documented, in order to bring awareness and understanding to issues that require resolution. However, when this documentation becomes too abundant it can act counterproductively. The real questions that need to be asked are, is there a point of saturation where this imagery become ineffective? And to what extent is this work created at the emotional expense of those truly impacted?” Note that this discussion is not necessarily about whether or not to show people!Read more »

Justin James Reed just published an excellent post, which talks about an important point that is very rarely discussed: “One other element that always lingers in the background for a photographer that works in a method like Burtynsky is the issue of access. […] Which brings me to Polidori and Gursky. It seems to me that a lot of the imagery that I associate with these photographers is deeply rooted in the idea of access. Images of factories by Gursky and Burtynsky seem to separate themselves very thinly in terms of individuality and complexity.” Also note the related post by Liz Kuball. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but I do think that Alec Soth’s comments about tactile photography are - at least in part - somewhat related to this.Read more »

Even though this is already a few weeks old, you might not have heard of it, and it’s quite relevant for a variety of reasons: “Three years ago, Lara Coton took a self-portrait and uploaded the image to deviantart and Flickr. Today, that image is being used as the front cover to a pornography DVD. The only problem is, Coton was 14 when the image was taken and she never gave permission for anyone to use her picture.” (source) You can find Lara’s Flickr page with her post here.
Breaking News: Mrs Deane reports it’s a hoax. Sic perdit gloria mundi.Read more »

In an absolutely wonderful post about the subjects of one of his photos, BertTeunissen writes: “There was absolutely nothing in the house that they didn’t need to live their lives. When asked if they were lacking anything the man stood up, walked to the chabot in the back of the room, opened it and said: ‘We have everything we need.’ Inside we saw a piece of homemade bread, homemade cheese, homemade chorizo, homemade olive oil and homemade wine. ‘And besides that,’ he said, ‘we have each other,’ and he sat next to her to be photographed.”Read more »

Question: What do Christine Collins, Jen Davis, Ben Donaldson, Amy Elkins, Peter Haakon-Thompson, Todd Hido, Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, and Shen Wei have in common? Answer: They will all participate in a show entitled “A New American Portrait”, opening on June 22 (note the updated date!) at jen bekman, with the show being co-curated by Jen and me.
Next question: What portraits do the photographers in the show pick as their favourites? Answer: To be found here.Read more »

For once, I’m speechless: “They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!”Read more »

In Karsh: The Art of the Portrait I found this following bit about Yousuf Karsh’s famous portrait of Churchill (which I personally find vastly overrated, especially in light of Karsh’s other output): “There is no doubt that Karsh was presented with an extraordinary piece of luck when Churchill continued to puff on a cigar after taking his designated place for the portrait. But there was more than luck in Karsh’s reaction to the moment. Recognizing, in the first instance, that the big cigar was an inappropriate accessory for this world leader, and then, after his instinctive snatching away of the cigar, perceiving that the resulting expression of belligerence on Churchill’s face offered the right moment to make the exposure - that was an act of genius.” So far, so good - this is right in line with Richard Avedon making the faces of the former king of England and his wife drop by telling them his car ran over a dog, when they were too chipper for his photo shoot. But the interesting bit is still to follow: “A second exposure made after Churchill had recovered his composure shows a slightly smiling, almost cherubic man - the portrait his family preferred, but not the one that became the famous symbol of lion-hearted determination in the face of evil aggression.” (my emphasis) Leaving aside the almost painful cliché (“lion-hearted determination in the face of evil aggression”), the existence of these two portraits - the famous one, and the other one that I have been unable to find anywhere - tells us a lot about how portraiture works. I might be mistaken, but it’s not just the interaction between the photographer and his/her subject that makes a great portrait, it’s also what the viewer wants to see in the result of that process.
Update: A reader emailed me to tell me that “you can see the ‘smiling portrait’ and the story of the session, amongst other things, on BBC’s Decisive Moments, ep. 4.”Read more »

It’s Friday, the day you can get away with anything, so here’s some utterly shameless self-promotion (of sorts). I wrote a little something about my favourite “classic” portraits (or at least some of them) over at the jen bekman gallery blog.Read more »

Check out Peter Menzel’s excellent Hungry Planet. You can see some sample photos here (the photos are in a popup window, ignore the main window, the magazine’s main page) - these photos show what each family eats and drinks per week, with the total amount of money spent and the families’ locations given underneath.Read more »

There’s a two-part exploration and comparison of the works of Stephen Shore and Andreas Gursky (and others) at Artinfo (part 1, part 2). I am not so sure the comparison succeeds with what it is trying to do (especially in the second part), but it certainly is quite interesting.Read more »